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 Electronics : XFX MBN790IUL9 nForce 790i Ultra SLI DDR3 1600Mhz FSB Socket LGA 775 ATX Intel Motherboard |
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Rating:  - Solid, stable, top-of-the-line
I built a system with this motherboard, an Intel Q9450 CPU, and 4MB of OCZ memory. Booted up fine, Windows Vista installed with no additional drivers as long as you don't use RAID (though I did put the latest chipset drivers on when Windows finished installing.)
Now that it's up and running with Windows updates applied & software loaded, it's as stable as any system I've ever used. Forget what you've heard about problems on previous nVidia motherboards - this one works and works well. I avoided building my own system for years because I thought it would be a hassle getting everything to work together, but I've had no such problems. (I did have problems with system crashes after waking from sleep mode, until I installed the P07 BIOS and the latest nVidia drivers. Now there seem to be no sleep-related problems.) And of course, it is insanely fast. Haven't had the chance to try SLI yet... maybe in the future.
As you would expect for this price, the monitoring and overclocking utilities are excellent. If anything, the BIOS has TOO MANY options. Tons of ports, including older ones like PS/2 mouse & keyboard, IDE, floppy, and 1394. Even a serial port is provided (though not on the back plane.) Six SATA ports. Ten USB ports (six on the backplane, four on the motherboard.) Two eSATA ports (one in the rear and one on the motherboard.) Two gigabit ethernet ports. Only an on-board 56K modem is missing (that is not a major omission, but it's handy for faxing every once in awhile.)
My only complaint is with the slots provided. There are three PCI Express X16 slots, but only two PCI Express X1 slots. The board also has two legacy PCI slots. This board could have gone without one (or both) of the old slots, and provided more PCI Express X1's instead. It would seem that anyone who would spend $350 on a motherboard is going to upgrade their legacy PCI cards too. So, if you do tri-SLI with double width video cards, understand that you will have only one PCI Express x16 remaining. If you do dual SLI, you'll have a legacy PCI and a PCI Express x1 left over. So, if you want a sound card and a TV tuner card on top of that (and who wouldn't?) you may run out of space.
Less significant, there is a small fan provided to cool the chipset, and it blows hot air point-blank onto the side of the card in the top PCI Express X1 slot. I wish they would have oriented the fan to blow in a more benign direction.
In summary, this motherboard is not cheap, but it's terrifically fast, customizable, and expandable. If you're not on a budget, consider this for your next system.
Rating:  - Buy the EVGA Version of this Board NOT the XFXForce Version
The XFXForce products and their support policies STINK! We had flashed the board with a new BIOS only to find out that the this company posted incorrect files to their web site.
I shipped the board back to them via overnight express, I told Dan, and countless others that this is a production system that have this board, and that I have now been without a working board for 8 days. (Again, thanks to their INCORRECT postings on their internet page, for both BIOS AND MOB Drivers (x64 intel drivers where actually AMD Drivers!)
They ended up having to replace the board b/c of defective workmanship (Not the BIOS) and they shipped it back GROUND adding another 5 days, after verbally stating they would ship it back the way they received it!!! What is amazing is that I had contacted the EVGA folks who responded within the hour via email, and immediately diagnosed the situation as a "wrong bios".
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